Re: [zzdev] Re: [zzdev] Re: [zzdev] Killer Apps (was Re: How'd it go?

[Benjamin Fallenstein <b.fallenstein@xxxxxx>]

Tuomas Lukka wrote:
> A servlet is one possibility; being a full HTTP server is another. I'm
> almost leaning towards the latter, running another webserver on the side
> for static content.
> 
> > Editing HTML in *true structure*:
> > -- being able to follow links back (at editing time)
> > -- no broken internal links
> > -- removing a page also removes links to that page, automatically
> > -- build-in rich visualizations of site structure, not bound to hierarchies
> 
> Sounds like a good way of showing "normal people" a glimpse of what ZZ has
> to give.

One of my reasons for wanting this.

> Why don't we spec a minimal subset, implement it and publish it
> somewhere (my list of publications needs some feeding ;) ;)

What, do you think, is a minimal subset? I think we'd like to have:
- arbitrary HTML tags
--> would be nice if they'd be in a parallel tag structure, so that
showing the text is easy
- links in ZigZag structure which are automatically converted to HTML
--> should be easy to visualize *all pages that link to this one* easily
--> HTML target anchors should be supported (text-to-text instead of
text-to-page link)
- HTML templates, on the level of pages or parts of pages
- scriptability: auto-generated pages or parts of pages (as a special
case of templates)
- links to scripted pages, passing along parameters
- maybe links to images? I mean, of the non-breaking kind within the zz structure?

> > I think this is something many people would jump upon. Finally we may
> > want to transcend the web: but this is on the same level as your file
> > browser or zzshell, showing zz's capabilities while maintaining the old
> > structures for some time, until people have migrated to zz. Also could
> > be used as a Xanadu-to-HTML converter when ZZ supports U.Green (xu88),
> > but people haven't Xanadu software yet.
> 
> Yes, and it also ties in with Ted's idea of the dual http://... xu://...
> space, where a xanadu URL can be used to access the richer content from a
> ZZ client. Being able to show people "here you see a table, now let's
> switch mode, and browse it and the links much more interactively, they get
> loaded to the cache as fast as the protocol can...". Nice.

This would require a standalone server, as servlets can only serve HTML,
right? A reason to look in that direction.

> One thing I've been toying with is an UDP protocol for zz cells: TCP/IP is
> slowed down because it deals with a stream where things have to be
> received in time. With UDP we could send more data and then just resend
> the dropped packets when requested. The client would always display what
> it could.

Sounds reasonable. Any idea on when client/server will happen? Do you
tend to do it with applets or with standalone clients? The latter would
probably easier to program, but on the other hand the former integrates
directly into today's browser pages.

- Benja